Photo courtesy of WAFA news agency.
Palestinian platforms circulated footage early Thursday showing worshippers streaming into the compound, expressing joy at returning after weeks of closure.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that around 3,000 worshippers managed to perform the dawn prayer despite strict Israeli measures, including identity checks, the denial of entry to some young men, and reported assaults on worshippers at the gates.
Israeli police also detained a Jerusalemite woman at one of the mosque’s entrances, just hours after another young man was arrested inside the compound, WAFA added.
Witnesses said Israeli forces forced several young worshippers to leave the courtyards while settlers entered the site.
The reopening followed an Israeli announcement late Wednesday allowing access to both Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in occupied Jerusalem, after they had been fully closed since the outbreak of the US-Israeli war on Iran on 28 February, under the pretext of "security concerns".
However, hours after the reopening, settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa compound under the protection of the Israeli occupation forces. The Jerusalem Governorate said the incursions included singing and the performance of Talmudic prayers inside the mosque’s courtyards during the morning period.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) said that the Israeli decision to reopen Al-Aqsa is actually aimed at facilitating access for “extremist settlers” to perform religious rituals inside the compound, describing the move as a violation of the historic status quo and warning it could inflame religious tensions and threaten regional stability.
Separately, Israeli forces shot 28-year-old Alaa Khaled Mohammad Sbeih near the village of Tayasir, east of Tubas in the occupied West Bank, and are withholding his body.
Local sources told WAFA that Palestinians had confronted settlers near the village before Israeli forces arrived and opened fire.
In the war-battered Gaza Strip, a young man and a child were killed by Israeli fire in Khan Younis in the south and Beit Lahia in the north of the enclave.
The child was shot while attending lessons in a tented classroom affiliated with Abu Ubaida bin al-Jarrah School in Beit Lahia, WAFA reported.
On Wednesday, Israel assassinated Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Mohammed Samir Weshah in Gaza City, as part of a broader pattern of attacks on journalists covering the genocide in the strip.
Gaza’s Government Media Office stated that the killing brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since the outbreak of the genocide to 262.
Since a ceasefire was announced in October 2025, the Israeli occupation army has killed at least 736 Palestinians and wounded more than 2,030, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Since the outbreak of Israel's genocidal war on the strip in October 2023, Israel has killed 72,317 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and wounded 172,158 others.
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